Explanation

'Spore' is a game that was released in 2008. Too bad it was $50 when it first came out. Spore starts you off as a small little water bug and when you become smart enough you leave the water for land and start growing. Scale wise you start off very small and only concerned with your spot of water. The next two stages the scale grows to being the entire continent. Once you start building cities you get to view the entire planet. The last stage is space, where you get to first travel your own solar system, then the entire galaxy. Since Cueball can't afford Spore (which is now only about $15) he instead is recreating the experience by playing older games, starting off with small scale games ('SimAnt' comes to mind), then up to 'The Sims', then 'SimCity' before playing a game on a planet level ('Civilization') then galactic level ('SimSpace'?)

The title text refers to the game not being able to run on the Mac using a GMA 950 which is a type of Intel integrated graphics processor. It was first supported in OSX 10.4. It lacked hardware support for "Vertex Shader 2.0" which some games required.

Discussion

Explanation mentions 'Civilization' for planetary scale, but comic explicitly suggests 'Populous' (which... though memory might fail me, was at least most of a planet in scope, controlled in one of the first popular God Game formats...). And SimSpace might well be Galaxy-level, but 'Alpha Centauri' is itself a game (semi-direct sequel by Sid Meier to Civilization itself), in case anyone thought that this was just a reference to the star(s) in such a galaxy-level simulation. 178.107.63.150 01:15, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

You can now get Minecraft (which should sate your need for evolutionary sandbox games) for free. 108.162.249.240 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

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